Author Information: Frank Scalambrino franklscalambrino@gmail.com
Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3nI
Editor’s Note: As we near the end of an eventful 2016, the SERRC will publish reflections considering broadly the immediate future of social epistemology as an intellectual and political endeavor.
Please refer to:
- Clarissa Ai Ling Lee, “ArtScientist/ScienceArtist: Finding a Creative-Intellectual Room of One’s Own”.
- Mark D. West, “The Holidays and What is Given”.
- Adam Briggle, “Post-Truth Blues?”
- Alcibiades Malapi-Nelson, “For 2017: Beyond Precaution”.
- Matthew R. X. Dentith, “Distributing the Epistemic Burden”.
- Robert Frodeman, “Marley’s Ghost and the Loss of Order”.
- Steve Fuller, “Embrace the Inner Fox: Post-Truth as the STS Symmetry Principle Universalized”.
Image credit: Walt Jabsco, via flickr
Presently my interest in social epistemology is primarily related to policy development. Though I continue to be interested in the ways technology influences the formation of social identities, I also want to examine corporate agency. On the one hand, this relates to the notion of persona ficta and the idea that, beyond the persons comprising a group, a group itself may be considered a “person.” Take, for example, search committees for tenure-track professor positions. There is a sense in which the committee is supposed to represent the interests of the persona ficta of some group, be it the department, the university, etc. Otherwise, it would simply be the case that the committees were representing their own desires, or merely applying a merit-based template, and though the former characterization may often be true, the latter is clearly not the case. Moreover, because the decision-making is supposed to be in the name of, and based on the authority of, the persona ficta, the members of the search committee are supposedly not personally responsible for the decisions made. The questions raised by such a situation in which a persona ficta may be seen as a kind of mask covering the true social relations within the group determining the group’s decisions, I contextualize in terms of social epistemology.
On the other hand, I am interested in thinking about corporate agency and its efficacy in social environments. This is not unrelated to the question of the relation between the interests, knowledge, and actions of the corporate members which in some sense condition and sustain different types of (persona ficta) corporate agents. In other words, it is as if the collective interests, knowledge, and actions of members of a group constitute a kind of collective agent back to which changes in the world may be traced. I am interested in what I consider to be the ethical questions, which to some degree should factor into the various organizations of knowledge and power which sustain such corporate agents. To put it more narrowly and concretely would be to say, social epistemology may help us locate the points at which constitutive group members may be accountable for their contributions otherwise masked by some persona ficta. Subsequently, such accountability may be worked into policy development.
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